POLITICS DIVIDES.

Before the votes were counted, Trumpian populists were circulating memes about establishment media engaging in a demoralization operation.

Our President well might have been engaging in an information operation of his own, encouraging his camp followers to vote as if he were on the ballot.  This morning, it's clear his detractors were also so voting.  A wipe-out of proportions that, had the parties been reversed, would fall into Peter Jennings temper tantrum territory, followed.  That sort of commentary, suggests Steven Taylor with Outside the Beltway, commits a category error.  "I am not absolving individual voters for their moral choices. But if the goal is to find where the core problems are, blaming 'the voters' or 'Americans' requires a fair assessment of whether or not the system is measuring what 'the voters' want."  As he develops his thesis, he notes,

Look, if a majority of a country really wants fascism, no rules are going to stop a fascist takeover (or insert your extreme ideology of choice). Our problem is not that a majority of the population actually wants MAGA. Our problem is that it is possible for MAGA to control one of two parties.

And yes, in a perfect world MAGA should be enough to get people to flee the GOP en masse.

There's something charming about academic political scientists' conceit? belief? that governing? governance? can simultaneously be benevolent, effective, and accountable, isn't there?

MORE ACCOLADES FOR JOHN KASS.

The longtime Chicago opinion columnist, first with Chicago's Tribune and then as a free agent, called it a career in October.

CLEARING THE CUCKOOS OUT OF THE ACADEMIC NEST.

The so-called area studies departments, or critical studies centers, if you will, have long treated interesting working hypotheses as Articles of Faith.  "The fundamental problem confronting the 'studies' departments is that a lot of what passes as critical theory rests either on untestable priors, or is normative per se.  Don't say I didn't warn you."

It has long been my position that much of the work done in ethnic studies or critical theory can be handled, perhaps more properly, in existing academic departments, whether sociology or anthropology or English, and perhaps the presence of more conventional scholars might get the True Believers to offer better arguments.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Baptist Baseball Fans Torn Between Rooting For Team Named After Devil Or Team Named After Beer.

Friday is for fish fries in Wisconsin.  Just spitballin'.

Between the World Series and a communications upgrade at Cold Spring Shops (internet connected to the fiber backbone, landline phone number migrated to a mobile, old emergency mobile to be discontinued at the end of October) this compilation of Friday short takes is another emergency clearance of bookmarks.  Longer-form essays are likely to resume sometime next week.

HIGHER EDUCATION, PERSISTING IN MAKING THINGS MORE DIFFICULT THAN NECESSARY.

A week ago, the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, offered the worst deflection of all time from the professors' trade union.  "The American Association of University Professors president told the Commission on Colleges and Universities that institutions shouldn’t 'be expected to prioritize intellectual pluralism on settled scholarly questions.'"

I KNEW SOMEBODY WOULD GO THERE.

Somebody did.  "Brewers Playoff Hero Jake Bauers Makes Accidental Case for Medicare for All."

There's nothing like a Common Dreams contributor to turn a feel-good story about a nearly accidental most valuable player in the league championship series into tendentious leftist propaganda.

While generating headlines throughout the pennant race due to his outstanding hitting and field play, Bauers journey to the top of Major League Baseball has Cinderella elements. Just two years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Bauers was ready to retire from the sport’s highest level.

“He had been playing professional baseball since he was just 17, spending more than a decade bouncing across seven different organizations with little success,” the paper reported. “After batting .199 for the Milwaukee Brewers in 2024, he was frustrated, burned out, and ready to move on.”

Life outside baseball intervened, but in a way familiar to millions of American families, not just pro athletes who can earn millions in lucrative contracts and endorsement deals.

“Bauers’ wife, Lauren, learned she was pregnant with the couple’s second child,” the WSJ explained. “Suddenly, Jake’s plan to become a stay-at-home dad while Lauren returned to her teaching job no longer seemed viable. They needed health insurance—so Bauers begrudgingly decided to give his floundering athletic career one last chance.”

It's not as though a journeyman player who has been in the Cleveland and Tampa Bay organizations as well as with the Brewers has the lucrative contracts or endorsement deals of a Shohei Ohtani or Francisco Lindor.  And didn't the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act obligate school districts to provide health insurance coverage, and didn't the triumphantly-titled Family and Medical Leave Act ensure maternity leaves?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The World Series field is taking shape.  No Braves.  No Dodgers.  No Yankees.  No Red Sox.  Hey, Chicago, whaddaya say?  No White Sox.  No Cubs, no.  What the heck is a uniqlo, anyway?

The entire three-peat dream was built on the idea that this rotation was unbeatable in October. In 48 hours, Milwaukee solved it.  "They may have a bunch of Hall of Famers, but we've got a bunch of gamers.  And the gamers won this week."

The following meme is not authorized by the Milwaukee Brewers or any sports broadcasting outlet.

The compilation of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes is a way of clearing out assorted bookmark entries.  I do not intend to resume weekly Friday short takes.  By all means follow the links.

IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE DIFFICULT.

Only yesterday, I offered a suggestion.  "All that might be necessary is for scholars who work in or teach critical studies to treat its core premises as assumptions leading to testable propositions rather than as tight priors."

THIS DOES NOT HAVE TO BE DIFFICULT.

A Ryan Quinn essay in the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education asks "Can Colleges Achieve Viewpoint Diversity Without ‘Affirmative Action for Conservatives’?"  

As is often the case with these things, it's people who should know better using political party registrations as a proxy for faculty intellectual predilections, a form of potted demography only possible in states that require primary voters to declare a party preference (that's not necessarily an affiliation, as crossover voting is a thing) in advance of a primary election.

MAKING AESOP LOOK LIKE ADAM SMITH?

It's a clunky comparison, although George Washington Law's Jonathan Turley's "The Fair Share Myth And Other Socialist Fables" is spot on.

In my book, Rage and the Republic, I address the false claim that the wealthy are not “paying their fair share.” In fact, the top 10 percent already pay more taxes than the bottom 90 percent combined.

In 2023, the top 1 percent paid an estimated 38.4 percent of all federal individual income taxes. One can certainly raise the need for additional taxes to support public works, but it is simple demagoguery to claim that the wealthy do not pay their fair share when the top 10 percent pay an estimated 75 percent of federal income taxes. The U.S. income tax system is already the most progressive in the developed world, even before additional New York state and city taxes are added in.

Regular readers are aware of that algebra as well as the tussles over tax treatment of capital gains.

The record of ever-more-generous welfare states is not encouraging.

Amid a rash of capital flight, many ask why Mamdani would want to continue taunting the wealthy and portraying them as freeloaders. The fact is, wherever it gets a foothold, socialism becomes self-perpetuating. Wherever ruinous policies destroy an economy, demand increases for government services and welfare. Citizens become more dependent on government as wealth is diminished.

Gooder and harder, whether it's Britain or California or New York City.

HIGHER EDUCATION IS BEYOND PARODY.

It's hard to top "What’s Wrong With Civility?" in the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education.  It's about what you'd expect of the colleges of deaducation these days.  "Civility can be a tool of engagement. But history has shown it can also be used to oppress the powerless."

Never mind that "civility" and "civilization" refer to being able to live among others, which is to say, being able to rub along tolerably well with others, and up until, well, if not last week, at least in the days before the corona shutdowns when Donald Trump first came on the campaign trail and the remnant Militant Normals on campus were making fun of Student Affairs silliness, calls for civility on campus might well have served to make those Militant Normals live by bourgeois norms.  "Those traits confer evolutionary advantage among their adopters, and their absence among non-adopters serves as stranger danger."

LET'S PUT ANOTHER PIN IN IT.

Complex adaptive systems do what they darn well please.

In mid-August, "If you don't like the weather, wait" proved to be logical advice.  "The Old Farmer's Almanac forecast is out, and the Great Lakes summary might be 'expect anything."  "The almanac forecast predicts the northern Plains and Upper Midwest could be drier at times, 'especially when the southern storm track becomes dominant.' Still, intense cold, wind and snow are possible, with clippers, sudden cold snaps and snowy periods likely.'"  So, too, with the northern hemisphere's hurricane season, which is defying all the expectations.

A fortnight later, a seer probably using a different formula than old Rob^t B. Thomas's is out with a similar prognostication.

Millions of Americans could see a harsh winter with multiple snowstorms and freezing temperatures that turn several states into an Arctic 'battleground.'

A recent long-range forecast model from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed a massive shift in the bands of heavy precipitation between December 2026 and February 2027.

That map shows a growing chance that the entire US East Coast will see above-average precipitation this winter, from southern Maine to the tip of Florida and stretching across the country into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas as well.

On the West Coast, California is also expected to see above-average precipitation this winter, which likely means feet of snow in the Sierra-Nevada mountains and other high-altitude areas out west.

While more precipitation than usual does not always guarantee snow, several independent forecasters have predicted that at least 19 states should be bracing for a potential blockbuster storm season.

According to independent forecaster Direct Weather: 'We do expect nor'easters to be a frequent event this year up the East Coast, and these do tend to be snow producing at least for somebody depending on where that low [pressure system] is located.'

Meteorologist Ryan Hall added that a stretch of the South, Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, including Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Appalachians, the Carolinas and Virginia could be in the greatest danger this winter.

Hall said: 'On my map, this is the winter storm battleground, and this is actually where my forecast has changed the most. I'm now a lot more confident than I was a few weeks ago that somebody in this corridor is going to get a big snowstorm or a big ice storm this winter.'

We already saw a nor'easter that formed in sub-tropical waters and brought havoc to the east coast before the first hurricane to make landfall did so on the Florida gulf coast last week.

As far as that mid-October frost: not here, not with a record daytime high just set in Milwaukee where it's actually hotter than it is in Los Angeles.  The roof and panels are open at the baseball park.

On the other hand, the northerly latitudes of Montana got some snow over the weekend.

THE LIBRARIAN AND THE CAR KEYS.

A fortnight ago. my Chicago Boyz colleague David Foster responded to "[Y]ou couldn't circulate a manifesto to millions of followers using a teletype machine and stepper switches; you couldn't run multiple errands on the way home from school or work without a motor vehicle; and somehow Super Sized humans are a different sort of public health problem than starving humans" with a Twitter exchange that inspired a full-length post in which he noted,

The invention of the printing press drove, over several centuries, the decentralization of information and opinion influence. But with the coming of the steam-powered printing press and associated equipment (expensive) and the telegraph network for information transmission across thousands of miles, there was a re-centralizing effect. This was further driven by the introduction of broadcast radio, and, especially, television, with their limited availability of frequencies / channels.

The early days of the commercial Internet, especially with the addition of message boards and blogs, drove a new decentralization in a way analogous to what the printing press had done. A single individual could now take on the factual errors or the misrepresentations of a heavily-capitalized news organization and actually win…the old saying that you can’t win against somebody who buys ink by the barrel was no longer so true.

But with the coming of social media, there has been a re-centralization effect: algorithms could be tuned to deemphasize or totally suppress certain voices or opinions. Facebook, YouTube, and the (pre-Elon) twitter all did this, sometimes at the best of the government.

There is a clear risk that AI will further drive the re-centralization, as popular LLMs become regarded as The Single Source of Truth and people lose the habit of searching more broadly. And there is a very serious danger that governments will seek to control this source of truth.

That's something that was already on my mind.

There are no solutions, only trade-offs. A future post will explore reasons to be wary of information companies with relatively free rein to develop new forms of machine learning, or artificial intelligence, or enhanced data scraping, as well as of governments either regulating that development, allegedly in the public interest, or in controlling it.

But Greg Lukianoff and Adam Goldstein did most of the heavy lifting for me.  Their version of the tradeoff emerges as "What everyone should be afraid of: tyranny over truth itself."

I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT.

Our President hopes to do Andrew Carnegie, Elbert Gary, and Joe Magarac one better.  "President Trump Announces Largest-Ever Steel Plant Coming to Iowa."  The president's political allies in Iowa's Congressional delegation and in state and local government all join in hailing the development.  There's something off about the project, though, as I will argue at length below the jump.

BUYING INTO AMERICA.

My position on immigration and assimilation has long been "Give these kids an America to buy into, and an America that buys into these kids, and we'll be OK."

That picture is from the 2016 Oktoberfest season at the Bavarian Bierhaus near Milwaukee.  The youth soccer players doing some fundraising for the Bavaria youth soccer program are now young adults, and, who knows, some might be starting families and bringing up the next generation of Bavaria's players.

Last weekend brought us Milwaukee's lakefront Oktoberfest, which shared the weekend with baseball playoffs, and buying into American cultural appropriation was in Ordung.

That's a candid shot, several of those festival goers had been posing together for photos to share alike.  As you see, they're serious about their beer, with a half-liter cup and a liter souvenir Maß or two on that table.

WILLIAM BLACKSTONE'S LOSS FUNCTION.

In statistical inference, the loss function is, loosely, a way of quantifying the consequences of a deviation of your estimate from reality.  I was looking for something precise and intuitive with the help of a search engine, and down the rabbit hole that quickly goes as apparently the people writing artificial intelligence algorithms make all sorts of use of loss functions, and whether they put more weight on positive or negative deviations of algorithm from reality might be an art form.  Ah, the joys of being pensioned off.  Here's my fortysomething self.

In statistical inference, there are two serious mistakes a researcher can make. The first type, which practitioners call Type I error, involves the rejection of a true null hypothesis. In many circumstances, people will describe such a case as a "false positive," because the null hypothesis is commonly absence of something (a disease, a price effect) and its rejection involves a mistaken diagnosis or a "statistically significant" coefficient (particularly troublesome if said coefficient also has the "wrong sign.")

The second type, per corollary a Type II error involves the failure to reject a false null hypothesis. Here, a sick person tests as healthy, or a coefficient that ought to differ from zero prints out as "statistically insignificant."

Sometimes, a researcher will speak of the power of a hypothesis test against Type I (or Type II) error, something that might be of great value if you don't want sick people tested as healthy, or as innocent people tested as guilty.

In a hypothesis test, the alternative hypothesis is the statement that the null hypothesis is false. If the alternative hypothesis is actually true, the power is the probability that one will correctly reject the null hypothesis. The most meaningful application of statistical power is to decide before initiation of a clinical study whether it is worth doing, given the needed effort, cost, and in the case of clinical experiments, patient involvement. A hypothesis test with little power will likely yield large p values and large confidence intervals. Thus when the power of a proposed study is low, even when there are real differences between treatments under investigation, the most likely result of the study will be that there is not enough evidence to reject the H₀and meaningful clinical differences will remain in question. In that situation a reasonable question to ask would be, was the study worth the needed time and effort to get so little additional information.

The usual question asked involving statistical power is: what sample size will result in a reasonable power (however defined) for the primary hypothesis being investigated. In many cases however, a more realistic question would be: what will the statistical power be for the important hypothesis tests, given the most likely sample size that can be obtained during the duration of the proposed study?

In statistical inference, "significance" and "confidence intervals" are artifacts of sample size, and generally loss functions and calculations of power are symmetric with respect to the divergence of estimator from reality.  Thus, for example, "least squares" regression, minimizing the sum of the squared residuals (a fancy way of saying estimator differing from reality) more harshly penalizes larger errors compared with smaller.

THANKS, FEMINISTS.

"A Hypothesis Becomes Harder to Reject" concludes,

Fifty to sixty years ago the second-wave feminists, seeing only the upside potential of the Pill with abortion-on-demand as the backstop plan were all about those "casual sexual encounters," with or without "an ethic of care," and the "alternative lifestyles" fetish offers quite the diversity of sexual encounters.  And cracking down on the Greek letter organizations?  Sometimes that's all the rage, sometimes it's not.

Because culture is a type of shared consciousness, it is an emergent phenomenon, and it might be simpler to bet on emergence, and let the evolutionary dead-ends, whether of the rabbit culture or the Consciousness Revolution or of privilege-shaming, collapse of their own inconsistencies.

Nothing has changed in the eighteen months since that post, or in my evaluation of those fifty to sixty years of allegedly progressive social change.  The inconsistencies go on and on and on.  Combine an alternative lifestyle version of a casual sexual encounter in a Cornell fraternity house, and when the election cycle demands a new outrage to rile up the women of the fevered brow, the rage resumes.

You can be certain that nobody involved in the Cornell U fraternity gang-bang circus is going to come out looking good, not the frat boys, not the girl, not the county DA, not New York AG Letitia James, and not NY Governor Kathy Hochul. The latter two have decided to showboat what has become a rape case in an election year when both are up for another four-year term.

First, the incident itself: October 19, 2024, a Saturday night when upstate New York is at its fall color peak and the campus is jumpin’, 20-year-old “Jane Doe” starts drinking at her sorority, Delta Delta Delta (Δ Δ Δ, “Tri-Delt”) whose motto is Let Us Steadfastly Love One Another. Around eleven o’clock Jane goes into downtown Ithaca to do more drinking at a bar. She’s legally underage, but manages to get served.

Meanwhile, messages are zinging around on social media, Snapchat, etc. There’s a party going on at the Chi Phi fraternity (ΧΦ). Jane communicates with one of the members there. He cordially invites her over for “a threesome.” Jane apparently has a reputation as a lively girl around campus. She accepts and heads over to Chi Phi with a load on, “five out of ten” on the intoxication scale, she later writes in a nine-page statement she gave to campus police.

She arrives at Chi Phi around midnight. More drinks. Pretty soon she’s in that threesome in a bedroom. The frat boys are also pretty hammered. Things get even wilder. Four other frat boys enter the picture. On top of the alcohol, they start doing ketamine, known to produce a dissociative “floaty, out-of-the-body feeling.” One’s judgment is not too good on it, even worse when mixed with booze. The scene at Chi Phi is Animal House plus. Various shenanigans ensue. Eventually, Jane Doe gets home.

The story, sans the obligatory home videos you know 'phone owners are recording, and the ketamine, is one of long pedigree.  The cause years ago was "date rape," perhaps modified to "acquaintance rape" in order to portray the woman involved as being deprived of her agency, whether it was assisted by beer or booze or enhanced by other stimulants or perhaps sedatives, and thus a victim of circumstances.  Never mind that, as appears to be the case in this Cornell story, the lady had her evening of what she thought was fun, then, a day or so later thinks, ewwww, I shouldn't have done that.  Now there's a whole therapeutic bureaucracy for her to lay out her victimization case.  A colleague correctly described that situation as the complainant simply lacking any character: she could have dialed back the pregaming, turned down the invitation, or excused herself when the drinks and the pharmacopeia started to circulate at Chi Phi.

A PRODUCTIVE PERSON'S FAIR SHARE OF TAXES IS NEVER ENOUGH.

The sort of achievement-resenting egalitarian who complains about wealthy people being "undertaxed" is often an innumerate who cannot distinguish stocks from flows.  It's one of my pet peeves.  "Tax incidence is messy, and distinguishing stocks from flows is hard, but never let that get in the way of The Narrative."

Meet the latest innumerate achievement-resenting egalitarian, Chuck Collins representing a nest of whiners calling themselves "Inequality."  It's the predictable rile-up-the-losers Common Dreams stuff.  "These 22 California Billionaires Don’t Want to Pay Their Fair Share."

EVERYTHING ELSE IS ELABORATION.

Jonathan Turley concludes his "Why We Shouldn’t Cancel the Supreme Court" with "In revolution after revolution, newly-established courts carried out the purported will of the people with terrible consequences. In an age of rage, it is too often reason itself that is canceled."

His essay, as befits a student of constitutional law, focuses on the role of the United States Supreme Court.  In the course of establishing his argument, he makes the following points about the American Founding.

Today’s attacks on the American judiciary do indeed harken back to the rhetoric that raged before the advent of “The Terror” in revolutionary France—the rhetoric that gave rise to the kind of “mobocracy” that the Founders sought to avoid by designing our constitutional order as they did.

To help understand this, it is useful to recall the fundamental differences between the American Revolution, which led to the world’s oldest and most prosperous republic, and the French Revolution, which led to a short-lived, blood-soaked tyranny. Both revolutions were based on Enlightenment ideas. But America’s revolution was closely tied to the political philosophy of John Locke, who held that our rights come not from the government, but from God. The institutional arrangements of the Constitution, including the independent court system, were designed to protect these God-given individual rights.

Conversely, the French Revolution was inspired in the end not by Lockean principles but by the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which extolled the “general will” of the people and opposed institutions (including courts) that interfered with that will. This concept of a general or popular will served as a license for French revolutionaries like Robespierre—who declared that “Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible . . . a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy”—to unleash a torrent of executions that would eventually come to turn on the revolutionaries themselves.

There is a radical movement rising in the U.S. with chilling parallels to the French Revolution. Demands for the elimination or packing of the Supreme Court and other measures are ripped from the French revolutionary handbook.

My stance, more as citizen with some knowledge of political economy than as constitutional or legal scholar, is that perhaps in a quarter millennium we got a few things right, as witness the Declaration and Constitution still governing, while France has had Bonapartism and four or five republics over the same time horizon.  Steven Hayward introduces the likely instabilities of any such reforms more directly.  "Progressive reforms would likely cause greater instability in our already unstable politics."  Why?  "If you think government is slow and ineffective now, that Americans are dangerously polarized, and that policy instability is a drag on the public interest, just wait till the Progressives get their way, and then demand another round of constitutional 'reform' when it doesn’t work out the way they hope."  Indeed, or perhaps mais oui!

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS, DOING WHAT THEY D**N WELL PLEASE.

In mid-August, "If you don't like the weather, wait" proved to be logical advice.  "The Old Farmer's Almanac forecast is out, and the Great Lakes summary might be 'expect anything."  "The almanac forecast predicts the northern Plains and Upper Midwest could be drier at times, 'especially when the southern storm track becomes dominant.' Still, intense cold, wind and snow are possible, with clippers, sudden cold snaps and snowy periods likely.'"  So, too, with the northern hemisphere's hurricane season, which is defying all the expectations.

Saith the reporters, "Hurricane season is broken. Two oceans are historically out of whack."  How so?

The 2026 hurricane season has been remarkable, from the potentially record-breaking calm in the Atlantic Ocean to the hyperactive eastern and central Pacific Ocean.

Only seven tropical storms have formed in the Atlantic, while 18 tropical storms and hurricanes have formed in the Pacific. In a normal year, the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific hurricane basins see similar activity, with 14 to 15 named storms, including seven to eight hurricanes by the time the season ends on Nov. 30. This year, the Atlantic hasn't yet produced a single hurricane, while the eastern Pacific has already produced eight.

What's interesting about this season is that a few of the storms that have occurred in the two basins originated in Africa and were influenced by the same powerful climate phenomenon, El Niño. But the results have been very different, with fierce hurricanes in the Pacific and unremarkable tropical storms in the Atlantic.

Maybe it's time to look more carefully at the observations and recalibrate those extrapolation models, which are excessively sparse anyway.